Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to content delivery. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to techniques for delivering content to electronic devices using local caching servers in the same local area networks (LANs) as the electronic devices.
Related Art
Recent improvements in computing power and wireless networking technology have significantly increased the capabilities of electronic devices. For example, laptop computers, tablet computers, portable media players, smart phones, digital media receivers, video game consoles, and/or other modern computing devices are typically equipped with WiFi capabilities that allow the computing devices to retrieve web pages, stream audio and/or video, share desktops and/or user interfaces (UIs), and/or transfer files wirelessly among one another.
Such increases in the capabilities and numbers of electronic devices have also expanded software distribution and digital content delivery to the electronic devices. For example, users of the electronic devices may frequently download music, movies, pictures, books, software updates, and/or applications from Internet-based content providers and/or content delivery networks onto the electronic devices.
On the other hand, bandwidth consumed by software distribution and digital content delivery may interfere with Internet usage and/or access from the electronic devices. For example, a digital textbook may be more than one gigabyte in size and take hours or days to download using a slower Internet connection at a school. In turn, downloading of the textbook onto thousands of electronic devices, each of which is assigned to one of thousands of students at the school, may take over a thousand hours to complete. Similarly, such downloading activity may consume a majority of available bandwidth on the Internet connection and slow web browsing and/or other Internet usage for users sharing the same Internet connection. Finally, the transmission of gigabytes or terabytes of data to the electronic devices may exceed an Internet Service Provider's (ISP's) bandwidth cap for the Internet connection, causing further slowdowns and/or increased charges for Internet access for the school. Consequently, delivery of content to large numbers of electronic devices using the same Internet connection may negatively impact the deployment and/or usage of the electronic devices.